Saturday, December 1, 2012

Campaign of the Century (Review)

In the final days of California’s 2012
election, attention began to focus on the machinations and spending of an
Arizona-based group which was campaigning vigorously around two ballot
initiatives: against Prop 30, which raised marginal rates on the wealthy and
sales taxes by a quarter cent on the dollar; and for Prop 32, an anti-union
measure aimed at leaving corporations in sole possession of the spending field.

The Arizona organisation drew a great
deal of attention to itself through its secrecy.The refusal to reveal the origins of the
funds or the names behind the group suggested that its backers had something to
hide.Americans for Responsible
Leadership (the name under which this money-laundering organisation hid even as
it billed itself as dedicated to “educating the public about concepts that
advance government accountability, transparency, ethics”) went so far as to
defy the request of the California Fair Political Practises Commission to
disclose its funding sources, and only released the information after an
eleventh-hour ruling by the state Supreme Court.

Greg Mitchell’s The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for the Governor of
California and the Birth of Media Politics (New York: Random House, 1992)provides a corrective to this
ahistorical viewpoint.Mitchell tells
the story of Sinclair’s campaign on the End Poverty in California (EPIC)
platform on a day-by-day, blow-by-blow basis, situating the muckraker-turned-politician
amidst the politics and popular culture of his day.

As the title suggests, Mitchell is
arguing (loosely) that this race was a watershed moment in the history of
campaigning.He describes how the good,
the great, and the downright ugly of California’s Democratic and Republican
Parties, the movie industry, and the banking worlds, amongst others, banded
together in an extraordinary alliance of convenience to halt what they feared
would be a threatening juggernaut.Their
fear allowed a now-familiar creature—the political consultant—to crawl out of the
sewers to take a hand in engineering both Sinclair’s defeat and the subsequent
centrality of political consultants to campaigning.

Clem Whitaker (who hailed from Willits)
and Leone Baxter (who lived for some time in Redding) pioneered the art of
crafting a smear campaign when they took up the task of representing Frank
Merriam, Sinclair’s Republican, incumbent opponent.They based the Merriam campaign on combing
through every word uttered by Sinclair (a prolific author), dutifully wresting
them out of context, and presenting them to the public as evidence for
everything from Sinclair’s commitment to breaking down the family unit to his
wild-eyed Stalinism (sound familiar?).

The role of Merriam in this campaign was
entirely subsidiary.Mitchell recounts
how Whitaker “offered a candidate what he called full-service campaign
management. This meant that he would
attend to every aspect of the campaign.The
candidate just had to be—neither the
candidate nor the party headquarters had to do”
(84).Another manoeuvre was the use
of Merriam’s incumbency to generate news (or at least things that looked like
news).The candidate’s appearances were carefully
rationed, his utterances calculated, and his every action viewed through the
lens of how or whether it would contribute to electoral victory.

While Whitaker would undoubtedly have
liked to claim credit for Merriam’s eventual election victory, there was
competition.William Randolph Hearst,
here as in other critical moments of the day, envisioned himself as being
central to Sinclair’s defeat.Hollywood
film magnates described their own efforts as “epoch-making” (543).And EPIC supporters would point their
fingers, trembling with rage, at Roosevelt, who met Sinclair and reportedly
promised him support which in the end was never forthcoming.

The book reads easily and briskly, and
FDR, Charlie Chaplin, Huey Long, Will Rogers, and Pat Brown make guest
appearances.In some respects, the title
is a little misleading, and the book is less a systematic argument about the
Sinclair race and the birth of media politics than it is an exercise in
portraiture.A sense of the era emerges,
but things like the process by which Campaigns, Inc (Whitaker and Baxter’s
organisation) was formed or operated receives sparing and slapdash
treatment.EPIC’s platform, which one
would have assumed would be centre-stage in any such story, is surprisingly
glossed-over in favour of a discussion of how it was portrayed by Sinclair’s
opponents.There is little attention
given to accounting for leftist politics of the era.In general, these themes make momentary
appearances and then drift out of sight.This weakness stems in part from the day-by-day format, meaning that
while dramatic tension builds marvellously, readers are hard pressed to keep
track of what precisely is behind that tension.

Written 20 years ago, Mitchell’s book
remains compelling because it exemplifies the frustration of grassroots, the
enduring power of money, and the bizarre alliances that emerge from a sordid
political process. A recent New
Yorker article seconded Mitchell’s estimation
that Campaigns, Inc. was a first, and goes on to tell the story of how Whitaker
and Baxter’s organisation has influenced California politics down the
decades...and not for the better.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.